It still doesn't have to be this way.
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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I mean, schools (k-12) pretty easily blacklist websites you can access, not sure why parents can't just do that if they want as well.
The amount of parental controls available now really give parents little to no room for excuses.
Man... When I was younger I used to fake my age, I know that some kid's still going to find a way to bypass the system like giving their parent's verification IDs or something..
What is it with Neo-Liberal governments and implementing over-reaching state controls that will eventually grant a tyrant unprecedented levels of control over public life?
Because they want to privatize all aspects of living so that a handful of exorbitantly wealthy people can build larger hoards. There's no end to it; it's a mental disease, enabled by Capitalism and the death of real Labor laws and rights.
Every industry should have unions that actively work to dismantle owner authoritarianism, but for 40 years Boomers have been paving the way for every awful piece of shit "business owner" to have some idolized place at the top of our society. And of course, the knock-on effect of that over time is that the pieces of shit have carved into the legislative and political arenas that provided even a modicum of worker/commoner protections. The digital divide is just a coefficient on the slippery slope.
I didn't need the Internet anyway thanks though
Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.
I am 420 years old.
That's a respectable age! Personally I'm 69 years old.
See, there are a few ways this could go.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it's left at that. I like to call this "the miracle", and we all know those don't happen.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for "access to data to prevent crime" - things degenerate from there. This is the "systemic failure" scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the "criminal element" scenario.
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Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the "system failure" scenario.
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Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the "unethical merchant" scenario, and the most likely outcome.
All in all, there is only one "ok" scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we're entirely boned ^_^
I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of "certain" citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
Or all of the above while still not being "as secure and private as promised".
Nothing is ever as secure and private as promised.
4, as it's already happening. It's just to be seen if people will have their lives ruined
We would need politicians to be the victims. Then these fascist laws will suddenly be cancelled.
If they were victims they would go even harder fascist, atleast that's usually the case.
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these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub
Fuck it, let's get back to something like the way it was.
Anonymous, amateur, just slightly hard to access to keep the mouth breathers out.
being able to use obscure internet forums does not preclude you from being a mouth breather
Well now that sounds a little like the fediverse itself!
I really, really dont want to search for porn on the dark net...
That’s what this is going to become. And that’s another point to this. They can just go after people using the dark net claim it was for kiddie porn even if it wasn't. the masses will just believe them.
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This isn't about being "age-checked". It's about IDing everyone on the internet and tracking where they go and what they do.
The world we live in is far far worse than anything from 1984.
Exactly this.
Governments have a rock hard boner for detailed face scans of every person.
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Sucks, because it's going global and we can't seem to stop it. I'm fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they're 15... well, let's make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But... making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?
how do you know it's going to be global?
Canada currently has a bill looking to do the same thing. AFAIK, Australia's already passed one, many US states are looking at them individually. The EU is looking at frameworks for it. I suppose there will be some places that won't, but this is increasingly looking like what governments have decided to do, and rather than geofencing, once a large number of money-making territories want this, I think most corporations will do it globally, and smaller sites simply won't be able to run.
For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL's so that the government doesn't know what you visited.
If I'm opening a stock market account, I'm trusting them with generating my tax receipts! If I don't feel comfortable trusting them to hold my personal data directly, I probably should choose a different brokerage...
Edit: Anyways, I'm annoyed enough that everyone has gone to phone based 2 factor that requires me to buy a phone and keep it on a cell network, so you can imagine how much I despise even an easier version of this.
After making the comment, I realised that stockbrokers need full KYC anyway.
You can use OTP codes without a phone, since you can buy OTP keychains. Which don't require any form of internet connection, same with the physical Passkey's.
I will not be participating. I'll get around any barriers they put in place.
And if I can't, I'll just stop using the internet for anything I don't absolutely have to.
I don't really need my smartphone. A laptop will do.
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Well time to sell thumbdrives to teenagers filled with "tutorials.mp4" and "online class.mp4" lol.
Just give em live distros with tor installed.
I legitimately dont understand who supports this. Who are these parents that can't parent their kids properly? It's so incredibly easy these days.
So instead of handling shitty parenting we restrict adults and with surveillance. Make it make sense.
One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there's everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else's civil rights to 'keep our kids safe' then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else's and won't always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than 'save the babies!' much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
bootlickers.
report, lol. what does that douchebag want to do? fine a foreign website for not serving content to his oh so precious country?
If you don't have a legal entity that can go to UK court, you don't even need to block them, let them block you, you did nothing wrong you don't have to accommodate them.
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Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
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There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don't take that responsibility themselves.
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It is not age verification.
It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.
Nothing less.
PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn't have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)
*On the Network tab - Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.
On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.
For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.
This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.
Yes, I porn.
*forgot Network tab
And thanks for all the suggestions. I'd rather not install browser plugins if I can do it without. CLI tools are cool though. The less I need to install the better.
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